thedailywhat:

Chances are, the location of the work is significant: In 2010, Poundland launched an investigation after it was discovered that a 7-year-old boy was working 100 hours a week in an Indian sweatshop, producing items for the store. A spokeswoman said at the time: “Poundland does not tolerate child labor under any circumstances and will not work with companies that employ children.”

[highsnobriety]

thepoliticalnotebook:

World Press Freedom Day Round-Up: “In 2012, 1 journalist is killed every 5 days.”

• Check out Global Voices’ Threatened Voices Project, which is a collaborative database that maps bloggers who have been threatened.
• The Committee to Protect Journalists has released a Journalist Security Guide that’s really comprehensive (H/T: Future Journalism Project)
• CPJ also has recent article on safer mobile use for journalists and a list of the 10 most censored countries.
• A WNYC interview with reporter Sebastian Junger about the organization he founded, Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, after the death of his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington.
• UNESCO has used the Ushahidi platform to crowdsource a map of World Press Freedom celebrations.
• UNESCO is honoring Azerbaijani journalist Eynulla Fatullayev with its annual Guillermo Cano freedom prize.
• Human Rights Watch is calling for action against Azerbaijan’s “appalling record on freedom of expression.”
• Reporters Sans Frontières reminds us that one journalist is killed every five days (see photo above). This day can be a celebration of freedoms but it’s also a time to consider how much there is to condemn and fight against.
• Here’s RSF’s 2012 Press Freedom Index. And, I encourage you to read through basically everything RSF has posted about journalists under threat.
• The Journalists Freedoms Observatory is noting the deterioration of press freedom in Iraq.
• From Amnesty International: reports on journalists and bloggers under threat in Sudan, Iran and Cuba.
• The International Federation of Journalists has a recently released report on the state of press freedoms in South Asia.
• UNESCO released a report in late March titled “The Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity.” 
• There is much cause to examine Pakistan’s press freedom problems. A report has apparently been released by the Pakistan Press Foundation, but I can’t yet find a copy. Be on the look out.
• Freedom House’s 2012 Freedom of the Press survey has an unfortunate stat: only 14.5% of the world’s population live in a country with a free press. There is good news, though. Egypt, Libya and Tunisia have all shown marked improvements with the overthrows of Mubarak, Gaddhafi and Ben Ali.

pitchfork:

Legendary BBC DJ John Peel’s extensive record collection— “over 26,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and many thousands of CDs”— is now making its way onto the internet.

theatlantic:

Who Has the Right to Fly a Drone Above Your Head?

While the government’s use of drones in other countries has drawn scrutiny, there are plenty of drones flying in American skies on behalf of the military, law enforcement, universities, and local governments. 

Just how many drones are zipping around is not clear, but thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s  Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Transportation, at least we now know which government agencies can fly drones. There are 58 institutions in total, including both active and expired “certificates of authorization” from the Federal Aviation Administration. They range from DARPA to the city of Herrington, Kansas to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. The individual list is interesting, but we thought the aggregated pie chart above made it easier to take in the data at a glance. 

Perhaps most interesting is how many universities have applied for permits. Some may be working with military grant money. There are relatively few law enforcement agencies using drones, maybe because of the expense involved. Only 11 local law enforcement districts have tried out the technology: Arlington PD, Gadsden PD, Georgia Tech PD, Mesa County Sheriff’s Office, Miami-Dade PD, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, Ogden  Sheriff’s Office, Polk County Sheriff’s Office, and the Seattle PD. 

Keep in mind, as the EFF points out, the number of certificates are not equal to the number of drones. So the military may have many, many drones flying while a city government might just have one.

Read more.

The NYC Department of Records has launched a gallery of over 870,000 photos dating back to the late nineteenth century.

"

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

Nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

"

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance.  (via motherjones)

70% of Sunday news guests are Republicans

sugarazor:

86% are male, 92% are white.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

Coupled with the news that came out earlier this week that only 3% of news stories ask scientists about global warming, the corporate media should be absolutely ashamed of itself. 

The media is soooo liberal.

jonathan-cunningham:

After a surge of voter interest and participation in 2008, a wave of anti-democratic voter suppression laws — designed to disenfranchise huge numbers of voters who are African-American, elderly, students or have disabilities — threatens to keep up to 5 million eligible voters from casting a ballot in 2012.

The ACLU points out that the new voter suppression laws are expected to decrease the amount of voters by roughly the same amount that the voting population increased in 2008, and the laws happen to be proposed in the five states with the highest rates of voter turn out in 2008.

theatlantic:

U.S. Teen Birthrates Are Down, But Still High in the Bible Belt

Teen birthrates are highest in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico, with slightly lower concentrations in the neighboring states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arizona. New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have the lowest rates of teen births.

What factors lie behind this geographic pattern? […]

Teenage births remain high in more religious states. The correlation between teenage birthrates and the percentage of adults who say they are “very religious” is considerable (.69). The 2009 study posited that attitudes toward contraception play a significant role, noting that “religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Teen birthrates also hew closely to America’s political divide. They are substantially higher in conservative states that voted for McCain in 2008 (with a correlation of .65) and negatively correlated with states that voted for Obama (-.62).

Class plays a substantial role as well. Teen births are negatively associated with average state income (-.62), the share of the workforce in knowledge, professional, and creative class jobs (-.61), and especially with the share of adults who are college graduates (-.76). Conversely, teen birthrates are higher in more working class states (with a positive correlation of .58).